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David Cronenberg to get a horror hero's welcome

By Garnet FraserToronto Star

Mon., Aug. 23, 2010

Fans of horror films have a diverse set of heroes, from the populists like Wes Craven and Eli Roth to foreign art-house favourites like Italy's Dario Argento. But if one name unites Canadian horror fans, it's the name of the man who will finally, after an open invitation stretching back years, meet them en masse at Toronto's Fan Expo.

“The timing has always been a problem,” says David Cronenberg, famed creator of disturbing cinema from Shivers to The Fly to Dead Ringers, who has wrapped his latest film in Europe and is back in his hometown, more than ready to decompress.

David Cronenberg greets at fan at the Rome Film Festival in 2008. (Ernesto Ruscio / FilmMagic)

“It's the mood I'm in. I've been making a movie for four months in Germany, most of it in a studio. You get done that and you want to expand a bit and meet people.”

The pleasure will be mutual and then some next weekend for the black-clad mob at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre taking in the Expo's horror arm, the Festival of Fear (put on, for the seventh year running, by Toronto's Rue Morgue magazine).

The 67-year-old director and Order of Canada officer has gone well beyond the bloody genre he started out in, nowadays making films like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, so he has an expanding set of cinematic admirers who may not be precisely aware of his beginnings. Next Saturday and Sunday, though, he will be among those who loved him first.

That kind of unspecialized esteem is less common among Expo special guests than is passionate cult appeal. This year's special visitors will include William Shatner, as well as familiar actor and Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine. But there are, as usual, five subcategories of the expo — comics, science fiction, gaming, anime and horror — so there are also names like Marvel Comics immortal Stan Lee and actors James Marsters and Lance Henriksen; you may not know their work, or not know that you know it, but at the Expo they'll be among their people and their feet need not touch the ground.

Cronenberg being an avid comics reader in his youth, but this type of organized fandom came after his time (“I was never much of a joiner, put it that way”). His work has much to say about biological horrors but less to say about popular culture — with the highly memorable exception of 1983's Videodrome— and even serious knowledge about the genre he started in, he says, came rather late.

“When I realized I was making horror films — and I wasn't aware at first that's what I was doing — I tried to learn the trajectory of horror filmmakers and how they got their films made,” citing George Romero and John Carpenter as people he studied and Ken Russell (Altered States, Lair of the White Worm) as a fellow Expo guest he's keen to meet.

“I never felt ‘I must see everything.' I sort of sense what film will feed me and nurture me, and I go that way.”

His next film may not have much to delight the horror devotee. A Dangerous Method, based on Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure, is about the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and the woman (Keira Knightley) they both treat.

After that, presuming funding stays stable — Cronenberg laments “a sea change in the film industry” with the demise of several independent backers like Miramax and Fox Atomic — he will be back in Toronto next year to start filming Cosmopolis, starring Colin Farrell and Marion Cotillard, and based on the Don DeLillo novel.

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After that, it may be back to horror — though, asked if he had any self-penned scripts ready, he replies dryly, “That's the problem, they don't pen themselves. You've got to pick up the pen and do it yourself.”

Either way, the man who gets fêted at both the horror fest and the Cannes Film Festival sees little difference between the posher film-lovers at the latter and the 60,000 or so enthusiasts at the Expo. And Cronenberg, who should know, says meeting his public is nothing to be disturbed by.

The most unusual fan he's ever dealt with, he said, was “a young man who sat outside my house dressed as William Burroughs (after Naked Lunch came out). He didn't approach the house, he just sat there for a long time in a suit and a Bill Lee hat, a fedora.

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